Career

On leaving school, Masie returned home to become her father's secretary.[2] She worked for the
Red Cross as a nurse during the
First World War, and after her father's death in 1916 she coedited with her mother a posthumous collection of his last lectures.[3]

Famous in her day as one of the names behind the imprint
Sheed & Ward and as a forceful public lecturer in the
Catholic Evidence Guild, her reputation has dimmed in subsequent decades. That is an ironic development given that she and her husband were ahead of their time in so many ways, foreshadowing most of what was good about the
Second Vatican Council.

Maisie Ward hailed from genteel Victorian blue blood, but she literally earned her own stripes, first as a World War I nurse and then as a writer. She could claim author's rights to the first and only authorized biography of friend
G. K. Chesterton[4] – a book which, to this day, remains as galvanizing on its subject as is Chesterton’s own on St.
Thomas Aquinas. And she also wrote widely in other areas, including New Testament scholarship, spirituality, and substantive biographies of Newman, her own father, and
Robert Browning. Also falling under her pen's purview were the stories of countless saints and lesser notables, among them her personal friend, the accomplished writer and mystic
Caryll Houselander.

In 1926 she and her husband,
Frank Sheed, moved to London and founded Sheed & Ward. Words were the couple’s stock in trade. The amount and quality of what they wrote, spoke, translated and edited are a tribute to the contagious enthusiasm born of their felicitous pairing.[5] The couple have sometimes been cited as a modern Catholic example of
street preaching.[6] Sheed himself wrote a posthumous tribute to his wife under the title The Instructed Heart.[7]